A friend said to me “You know why we get to vote in the US? Because our votes don’t matter.” I thought that was amazingly profound.
My wife was in a wine store looking for a small amount of an unusual liquor to make a recipe from a cookbook. They wanted to sell her a big bottle of it but she only needed a small amount. A customer overheard her and asked if she needed it to make that certain recipe; he mentioned that he had bought his liquor because he was making the same recipe. My wife mentioned that she was looking for other hard to find items for other recipes from the same cookbook (Ottolenghi’s “Jerusalem” cookbook) and the guy mentioned that he knew where to find them, and he would share some of his liquor from the big bottle she didn’t want to buy herself. He wanted to open the bottle in the store but that violates the store’s license; so he offered to walk with her to a nearby coffee shop and get a cup from there to put some into it. Maybe you’ll see this story in the Metropolitan Diary of the New York Times – he said he would send them the story, but meanwhile you’ve heard it here first.
Karen and I celebrated our 11th anniversary at the newly renovated Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center in New York City. It is an elegant place to celebrate a special evening and they have big band and dancing on selected Monday evenings.
Elizabeth turns 9 this month and is getting closer to being a tweenager. A few months ago it was “Wait..Comb your hair; you look like a mop.” “I don’t care.” Now it’s “Stop combing your hair already. It doesn’t need to be perfect.” “Yes it does…It needs to be beautiful.”
Any reason why people are attracted to and pay extra for iPods that will store a gazillion tunes in them and then just keep playing the same 50 songs over and over again?
Why is it that on the upper west side of Manhattan there are many places to buy clothing for your dog or cat than for your child?
In the department of emperor having no clothes: “It’s only a play” on Broadway has a star-studded cast doing the most awful script which would never otherwise have made it to Broadway. Don’t waste your time or money on it.
Why is it that the US spends so many billions of dollars fighting terrorism when many more Americans were killed this year colliding their cars with deer? I don’t think the US has a budget for or 24 agencies coordinated by a Department of Homeland Security tasked with hunting down deer.
Every time gas prices go up high people start dumping their big cars and SUV’s and they tell us that buying patterns are changing and things will never be as they were. Now oil prices are dropping and sales of those big cars are going back up again. You’d think that someone who buys a car that they expect to use through several oil price cycles would think for the long term when they buy. Just shows you how people forget and revert to historical patterns.
I’ve been noticing a spate of articles about how retro is back in fashion. You know, clam phones that don’t text but just make phone calls? Handkerchiefs you blow snot into. Things I have always liked but over which I’ve been ridiculed for years. Reminds me of when I was in law school over 20 years ago and saw this professor wearing a jacket that looked like one I’d bought in 1988 at a Nina Ricci store in Argentina. I complimented him on his fashion taste and he told me it was 25 years old, but that if he kept things long enough they were sure to go back into fashion. Moral of the story is to follow your gut. I know that people don’t multitask at work and that email does not necessarily make people more productive. I know that cellphones in meetings are evil. 5 years ago I couldn’t convince anyone of this, but nowadays you have to check your phone at the board room door and companies are clamping down on excessive emailing and have come to realize that people don’t really multitask.
Guess where the action is? A friend of mine reportedly made $120,000 in commissions last month selling real estate in Lubbock, Texas. A good amount of the activity relates to fracking and gas exploration. I wonder what happens to that industry with these low oil prices. My gut tells me that they will just get more efficient at fracking. I think that 2015 will be a good year for the US economy and the stock market; I am buying more Delta Airlines, Colgate, Altria, and Berkshire Hathaway. I am selling index funds outside the US such as Australia because I don’t see the Chinese out there buying as many commodities.
I think that US colleges and high schools ought to eliminate or severely cut back on varsity athletics and reshape their priorities. It is a drain of resources and not adding anything useful – the people who play on these teams are not getting educated and schools are wasting a ton of money and time on it. They should also rethink the investments being made on technology in the classroom, which are also of dubious value. A lot of the equipment is not even being used. It made me think of my visit to curriculum night a few years ago at my daughter’s school where the teacher kept praising her new smart board in the classroom; when I asked for a demonstration the teacher refused saying “but we haven’t been trained how to use them.” More money needs to go into hiring better teachers and making schools function better as schools, such as lowering class sizes, giving teachers what they need and making properties conducive to learning, such as providing air conditioning or heating. I just read a treatise on comparative education by Amanda Ripley called “The Smartest Kids in the World (and how they got that way)” which is a good read about what works and what doesn’t comparing schools in the US, Korea, Finland and Poland.
I read this story about Israelis setting up schools in Uganda for refugees who were sent from Israel back to Sudan. If Jews would set up a state in Uganda, it would probably be an economically successful country and there wouldn’t be a bunch of Arabs to fight against all the time. Most religious Jews wouldn’t participate, but most of what makes Israel economically successful involves secular Israelis. I think that there was some justification to the idea of setting up a Jewish state in Uganda 100 years ago. The more I go through my life, the more it makes sense. The majority of Israelis hardly ever go to Jerusalem anyway.
There was some logic in the US response to Ebola which was not probably intended but which ultimately occurred. Make it so miserable for anyone coming into the US from these countries and anyone they came into contact with to the point that these people would stop coming back until they were sure they didn’t have the virus anymore.
Here is a comment on the recent violence in Jerusalem. A few years ago I stayed at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. Walking around there was like walking around along the border of Greek and Turkish parts of Nicosia in Cyprus. Israeli Jews will say that Arabs pay no taxes so they deserve no services. Israeli Arabs will say they get no services so why should they pay taxes? It does not make sense for the long term that Arabs in East Jerusalem live in a hell-hole and Jews in West Jerusalem think they can escape their wrath when the relative richness of the West is so in their faces just a mile or two away. This is a problem that festers even though Arabs living there told me that they are happy to be living in the only calm area around them for 2,000 miles in any direction. But anyway, just because they don’t live in a war zone doesn’t mean they are satisfied living in clearly substandard conditions compared to those right around them. Israel either needs to invest in East Jerusalem and make it a more decent place to live or wash their hands of it, but keeping the city in this netherworld of neither here nor there for almost 50 years just is not a future for anyone. The myth of an undivided city will not stand; the latest wave of violence attests to that. They really can’t stop this kind of grass-roots violence without dividing the city. Nobody in their right mind should invest billions in infrastructure such as a light rail system that straddles both sides of the city and gets torched every time some Arab gets angry. Lately it’s been quiet and I suppose that when the Israelis started threatening to deport and revoke the citizenship of trouble-makers and their families it shut people up. Arabs still prefer to be citizens of Israel than Palestine.
There is something grossly cynical about the recent coverage of the violence in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. They seem to be saying that the government is enjoying the benefit of this violence in being able to criticize the rest of the world for supporting terrorism and for proving that there cannot be peace. A recent Haaretz headline refers to “PR Porn.” Who knows, maybe they are right? But it is disgusting to read about it in an Israeli newspaper that seems to be fanning its own ideological flames based on innuendo rather than proof that this is the case. Even Al Jazeera doesn’t stoop to that level.
Netanyahu has called for elections in Israel. I expect that Lieberman to his right has an excellent chance to become the next prime minister and Netanyahu will try to get the left and center to back him as the sane alternative, even though he has thrown them out of the government and appears to be pandering to his right flank. Interesting that I read an article in Haaretz this week in which a liberal commentator noted that at least people don’t think that Netanyahu is corrupt.
Russia: The Economist says that Russia overstates its financial reserves by 100-200 billion dollars and that its economic collapse could come suddenly without much warning. That is no surprise to me and I don’t think the world will much care. Russia is really not a player in the world economy and the world is learning to live without them. Europe likes its oligarchs’ money but that comes mainly from capital fleeing the country.
Iraq and Afghanistan both have new leaders that show promise. They seem to be acting like national leaders instead of sectarian leaders in charge of a country.
Obama’s problem is that he makes grand speeches with little action. Israel staged more daily air strikes against Gaza targets this past summer than the US does presently in Iraq or Syria against ISIS. The immigration executive orders that the president intends to carry out are very limited. You can’t expect people to stick their necks out to side with him when the actual effect of what he wants to do is so little. The Republicans have very little to offer of their own ideas on health care. There is so much rhetoric over so little of consequence when it comes to this health insurance thing to the point that I am perfectly happy to ignore the debate. The penalty for a person who doesn’t participate in the health insurance system is so little – the penalty for a year of not getting insurance is less than the amount of one month’s premiums. And so far everyone we hear from says that the insurance that you can get through Obamacare covers virtually nothing. The Republicans harp on tax credits to fund the cost of buying insurance, but the amounts are puny.
Some travel thoughts: I took a quick swing to visit offices in Houston and San Francisco. The Sheraton Gateway at Los Angeles Airport is a very good airport hotel with new facilities just beyond the airport’s perimeter. Corner rooms are very large and cost a bit more than a regular room. In Houston, the Granduca is a very nice all-suite hotel with kitchens and dining areas near the Galleria; the Italian restaurant was excellent with an extremely good tiramisu and home-made gelato. It is a comparatively cheerful hotel ; I’ve seen the St. Regis, Intercontinental, Four Seasons in Houston and this one is better and works at a very good price point. Virtuoso competes against American Express and Andrew Harper for travelers at prime properties and often offers better amenities, such as guaranteed upgrades at the time of reservation (as opposed to at check-in based upon availability). Another property I visited was Meadowood in Napa Valley, California. The views are mainly of the woods (no striking vistas of vineyards in a valley, which was what I had been hoping for) but the cabins are large and very nicely done, and the food is excellent. I didn’t eat in the famous restaurant because I did not want to sit through a 3 hour dinner presentation by myself, but the more casual bistro was excellent both for dinner and breakfast. This is not a property that is good with children unless they like golf or tennis. In Puerto Rico, it matters where you stay on the island. If you are near the tropical rain forest, you will get rained on a lot. The Ritz Carlton Dorado Reserve is on a part of the island that is relatively dry. The St. Regis gets a lot of rain and doesn’t have a swimmable beach most of the time. The El Conquistador is also near a rainforest. The Ritz Carlton is by far the best of the lot, with good food, rooms, pools, gyms, private water park, an exceptionally beautiful spa with a lot of outdoor areas, and a beautiful location on a very nice beach. We had no rain during any of our 5 day stay except at night. It also has some interesting children’s programming, such as snorkeling and underwater photography and creatures of the night, where you go looking and catching animals in the night. Some of the rooms come with private plunge pools and it is a very peaceful property located 35 minutes drive from the airport. It is more expensive than the others but sets a new standard for Puerto Rico that makes the island more inviting for those looking for top-tier properties. As we approached the airport to depart, we saw the rain clouds over the other part of the island and knew we had made the right choice.
Thus we come to another end of a year; in a few days I will head south. This year my wife made me promise that we wouldn’t go to Disney World so alas we are going to Universal Studios instead. This was a year in which actually a good number of things happened in the world when nobody was really noticing at the time. Some have tried to pull threads together and find patterns. I’m not so sure there is a big scheme to all this and, even if there is, I’m not so sure that the US is awfully excited about it. I foresee 2015 as being a year of economic growth and the US doing rather well. Enjoy it while you can.
